You Can’t Stop the Violence in Ghetto Streets Without Stopping the Violence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Elsewhere

You Can’t Stop the Violence in Ghetto Streets Without Stopping the Violence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Elsewhere.

By managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

“For more than a generation, the standard stance among America’s black political class was to demand an end to militarism, empire, and war at the same time they championed vastly expanded funding of education, housing, jobs and equal opportunities at home. “

I left Chicago at the end of 2008 for Georgia. But for the last year or more, when I tell people where I’m from the most frequently brought up Chicago factoid is the asinine proposal of a corrupt black preacher-politician to post the National Guard on ghetto street corners in an effort to stem a local epidemic of violence. I won’t mention the politician’s name or provide any links to him, but he’s the same idiot who last year referred to the Chicago Teachers Union as the most dangerous gang in town.

It’s a foolish idea on its face, of course. The National Guard isn’t trained to interact much with civilians, except to shoot up their houses and vehicles, to call in air strikes on their neighborhoods, or to break down their doors and drag them off to be tortured in secret prisons, or kill them on the spot, as they do daily in Iraq and Afghanistan. We suspect the preacher-politician knows this, and that even he doesn’t really want Apache helicopter gunships strafing schoolyards and wedding parties on the south side of Chicago. At the time, he just needed to keep his name in the news. Besides, if the task of misleaders is to mislead, spreading bogus notions about an “epidemic of ghetto violence” being at the root of our problem, and blaming victims all fit neatly into his job description.